https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/76968-obituary-richard-peck.html

Obituary: Richard Peck

By Shannon Maughan | May 24, 2018

First paragraphs:

Author Richard Peck, winner of the Newbery Medal and widely acclaimed for his realistic YA novels, died May 23 at his home in New York City following a long illness. He was 84.

Peck was born April 5, 1934 in Decatur, Ill., a place he described in his autobiography for Something About the Author as “in middle Middle America.”
His mother was one of seven siblings, and his maternal grandmother also had many sisters, so as a
boy, Peck recalled being “surrounded by elders of all ages,” many of whom had what he considered “fine names.” The stories related by the old men who
gathered at his father’s Phillips 66 gas station, and the tales of his grandmother, aunts, and
uncles were always swirling around him. “From my father I learned nostalgia as an art form,” Peck wrote in his autobiography. And his father’s experiences growing up in the country also added to the rich storytelling mix.

For his first 18 years, Peck grew up in a house located at the edge of an expansive city park that had a colorful history as a racetrack, county fairgrounds, and an amusement park over the years. He often spoke of the adventures he had while exploring
there. Though Peck would eventually live in New York City for most of his life,
the distinct sense of place from his boyhood remained with him, and he set most
of his novels in the Midwest. In addition to the Peck family’s oral traditions, Peck
recalled that his mother had read to him from a very young age, making him eager to tackle school and the larger world beyond. “I wanted to be a writer before I could read,” he said.

At age 16, Peck traveled to New York City for the first time, visiting a distant relative who worked at the United Nations and recalled, “This was the
place I’d been homesick for all along.” In his senior year of high school, a particularly tough
English teacher challenged Peck to master writing skills—rewriting, meeting deadlines, gathering interesting material—that he carried with him throughout
his career. Peck earned a scholarship to DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., planning to be
a teacher. He spent his junior year abroad at Exeter University in England before graduating from DePauw in 1956 with a B.A. in English Literature. After graduation, he served two years in the U.S. Army in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked as a
chaplain’s assistant largely doing writing, including sermons, and paperwork during a time of peace between the Korean and Vietnam wars. He received a master’s degree in English in 1959 from Southern Illinois University and continued his graduate
studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He began teaching high school at
Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Ill., in 1961 and three years later moved to New York City to teach English at Hunter College High School in New York City.

Peck credits his years in the classroom as the spark for many of his book ideas. “It was junior-high students, the puberty people, who taught me how to
be a writer,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They taught me... that people
don’t read fiction
to be educated. They read fiction to be reassured, to be given hope.”

In May 1971, Peck says he turned in his gradebook and pension plan from his teaching job and went home to write a novel. That first work became Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt (Holt, 1972), which addresses teenage pregnancy and was adapted as the 1992
film Gas Food Lodging. He hand-delivered the manuscript to George Nicholson, then editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Just one day later, Peck says that Nicholson called him and said, “You can start your second novel.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/05/24/us/ap-us-obit-richard-peck.html
(short obit)

https://www.google.com/search?ei=Cn4IW-HlFfjC0PEPofSxsAY&q=richard+peck++84&oq=richard+peck++84&gs_l=psy-ab.3...114075.116014.0.116151.3.3.0.0.0.0.162.443.0j3.3.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..0.1.161...0j0i131i67k1j0i131k1.0.GL2XN2CbXBY
(MANY obits)


https://www.kirkusreviews.com/author/richard-peck/
(Kirkus reviews)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22414.Richard_Peck
(reader reviews)


https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.arts.books.childrens/PMssDecbm74/0XFIFHUmsZoJ;context-place=searchin/rec.arts.books.childrens/richard$20peck$2080th%7Csort:date
(birthday post from 2014, with booklist & videos)

Excerpts:

"Are You in the House Alone?" won the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

He has six entries in the "Something About the Author" encyclopedia series.

In the first entry, in vol. 18 of S.A.T.A., he says:
"...fortunately I never had one of those English teachers who say 'Write what you know!' 'Write from your heart!' My teachers stressed vocabulary, the card catalogue, and the declarative sentence."

And if you can, look up vol. 55. It includes a great deal from his 1986 article: "The Genteel Unshelving of a Book," in which he describes meeting with
his first censor (regarding his 1978 novel "Father Figure") - a mother who turned out to be alarmingly
disarming because she was didn't fit any of the usual stereotypes; she was smart, very literate, and she didn't cloak her arguments in politics or religion. On top of that, she claimed that all of her daughter's clean-cut friends from families untouched
by divorce were essentially selected by her, from her church, and Peck said, in
effect: "If any other parent had said that, I would have been very skeptical."


Link:

http://irls520paternalcensorship.pbworks.com/f/The+Genteel+Unshelving+by+Richard+Peck.pdf

And (also in SATA) he talked a great deal about the lack of YA novels that deal
with male emotions, how they communicate, and how the mostly female librarians aren't helping much.



Lenona.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)